How ITV is making a dog's breakfast of Daybreak

ITV1's new morning show cost millions – so why are its ratings so low? Benji
Wilson points the finger.

Daybreak: Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley presentPhoto: ITV

By Benji Wilson

6:34PM GMT 02 Nov 2010

It was late August, and the scene was the press launch of ITV’s new breakfast show, Daybreak. Its predecessor GMTV had been in steady decline, so ITV had brought out the chequebook and, for a reported cost of £10 million, poached Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley from the BBC’s The One Show.

Alongside the usual bromides, Chiles said two things of note. One, that he needed Bleakley because he really wasn’t very good at the technical stuff – the cogs of a TV programme such as links and handovers. And two, that he didn’t give a fig for short-term ratings.

Two months in, with Daybreak getting thumped in the ratings, he will be glad that he doesn’t pay them any heed. None the less, his ITV bosses must be getting antsy – Daybreak started badly and has got worse, slumping to 500,000 viewers last week, which is lower than in the dying days of GMTV (when it was being presented by stopgaps). The BBC’s Breakfast is getting an audience three times the size. There was a delicious moment on Breakfast last week when they held up a front page to highlight a story about pensions. As luck would have it, the story next to it was about Daybreak hitting an all-time low. The camera appeared to linger for a second or two more than was necessary.

Ratings apart, however, it is Chiles’s admission that he is the kind of presenter who likes to let someone else do the nitty-gritty that is the most telling. Because Daybreak’s main weakness is him. It is no slur on his talents – he is a brilliant broadcaster, wry, witty, with an affable gruffness (all of which has gone down well with viewers of ITV’s football coverage) – but he is as wrong for breakfast as a beef stew.

Daybreak runs for 150 minutes, but with ad breaks, news, weather, sport and showbiz – plus an insistence on happy stories such as Monday’s “Pigwig the Micropig that’s grown too big” exclusive – there is remarkably little time for what Chiles does best. His stock-in-trade is deadpan musing with a knowing look to camera or sarcastic aside. Put him on a sofa opposite X Factor rejects Belle Amie as he was on Monday, or Aleksandr the car insurance meerkat, as he was last week, and he just looks bored.

Of course, The One Show was a similar mix of weighty and fluffy, which is where Bleakley comes in. She’s supposed to be the sweetener to his sour. But, as Chiles said at the launch, Bleakley’s main role here is to be the consummate pro – handle the links, cut to the ad breaks, show grandpa next to her how to work the laptop. There is much more of this to be done on Daybreak than The One Show. (The latter, for example, didn’t have ad breaks.) This means we get Chiles staring blankly at the running order in front of him, while Bleakley tries to mask a feeling of mounting panic behind a pasted-on perma-smile. Also, ITV viewers who are used to spending their mornings with mumsier, cuddlier hosts such as Fern Britton may find Bleakley off-puttingly young, thin and glamorous.

The BBC’s version of breakfast television is, simply, much more professional; it feels like an extension of their news programming. I’d venture that few of the BBC’s 1.5m viewers know all four of the anchors’ names, but, in their suits and ties, they all feel like news staff first and foremost.

“You hope there’s some wit and that the presenters’ personalities come through in the course of what they do, but I don’t want them to be too forced in that,” says Alison Ford, Breakfast’s editor. “I’m very keen that they’re not celebrities. They have the opportunity to show they’re capable of wit and whim but absolutely the starting point is the journalism.” A case in point: when Ashley Banjo of dance troupe Diversity taught Charlie Stayt how to do a bodywave on Friday, it was light done right – fun but not forcedly so.

Daybreak suffers from forced bonhomie. From the Hovis ad-style title sequence to the laughter from the crew, to the obvious diktat that Chiles and Bleakley should sit just a little too close together, everything here is supposed to feel cosy. The panoramic studio with its view of the Thames, therefore, is unfortunate – as winter has closed in, Daybreak has spent a sizeable chunk of its runtime draped in darkness.

An hour or two with Chiles and Bleakley feels more like being trapped in a bunker in the final phases of a war than being suffused in the glow of a smiley sunrise. For the producers, step one in the recovery effort has to be to remove the huge clock behind them, gently ticking away – because right now it’s beginning to look like a metaphor.